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Saturday, January 26, 2008

The Senseless Center

In the world of a moderate Christian, you can have your cake and eat it too. All of the pillars of modern science, including Big Bang cosmology and evolutionary biology, are held to be true, but Christianity is true also. Thus there is no conflict between science and religion , they are simply different ways of knowing. If fundamentalists and atheists would just relinquish their dogmatic, extreme, uncompromising positions and embrace the middle ground that moderates have staked out, we would all live in a more harmonious world. Christian moderates fashion themselves as peacemakers; they have the solution to the fruitless and often polemic debate between the two "extremes". Sounds perfectly sensible, right?

Actually, it's completely senseless. Christian moderates have committed the logical fallacy known as argumentum ad temperantiam (argument to moderation), wherein the middle ground between two positions is asserted to be the most reasonable merely by virtue of being the middle ground. The popular phrase the truth lies somewhere in between is essentially an appeal to argumentum ad temperantiam. While the middle ground is sometimes correct, it is entitled to no special claim on truth. Like any other claim, a middle ground claim must be established as true on the basis of evidence. On that score, moderate Christianity fails miserably.

To give just one popular example, moderate Christians usually claim that there is no conflict between the scientific story of the development of the universe (beginning with the Big Bang and ultimately leading to humans living on Earth via evolution) and the Bible (specifically the Book of Genesis). I have searched extensively for explanations of how to reconcile the two, and have found only weak rationalizations. I feel confident in asserting that no intellectually satisfying reconciliation exists.

The first tactic moderates often employ is evasion. The Bible is not a scientific textbook, they say, and ought not be read literally. The commentary at the beginning of my Bible (the New Revised Standard Version) says the following:

Chapters 1-3 deal with questions that have been asked in every age: "Where did the world and its inhabitants come from?" ... Genesis says: God created everything (1:1). The book does not give details as to when or how this was done. Innumerable fruitless arguments have raged as people have tried to use Genesis to prove or disprove various scientific theories. Genesis is simply not intended to be a scientific report. Rather, Genesis is a confession of faith. It declares that God is the Creator of all, and human beings are the climax of God's creation.Similarly, Francis Collins1, in his Time magazine debate with Richard Dawkins, said:St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.These attempts are hand waving are meant to distract attention from, and avoid confronting, what Genesis actually says. In Genesis 1, the entire universe is created in six days. The earth is created on the first day; plants are created on the third day; the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth; and so on, with humans appearing last, on the sixth day, and God "resting" on the seventh.

When pressed, moderates will declare this to be metaphor -- the "days" are not literal days but rather periods of time, perhaps even billions of years. To support this assertion, they point out that the sun is not created until the fourth "day", and since it is impossible to have a day without the sun, the term must have another meaning. They may also point to phrases later in the Bible, such as "with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day" (2 Peter 3:8).

This explanation is absurd. Even were we to allow the "days" is Genesis 1 to represent billions of years, the order is completely wrong. Science has taught us that the sun existed before the earth, and certainly before plants. Genesis has the earth created first, then plants, then the sun. Furthermore, we have strong textual evidence from elsewhere in the Bible that the six days of creation are meant as standard 24 hour days. In Exodus 20:8-11, the fourth of the famous ten commandments is given as:

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work. . . For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day.Clearly, God was not telling the Israelites to work for six periods of billions of years, then rest on the seventh period of billions of years. Even if moderates could concoct an explanation for reconciling cosmology and evolution with the Bible (which I doubt), they would still have to clear the additional hurdle of showing why their position is more reasonable than the one that both fundamentalists and atheists hold -- that the Bible simply means what it says. Why would an omnipotent and omniscient God be such a poor communicator that he has misled scores of generations of humans as to their origins, and placed the Bible on a collision course with science? Why doesn't Genesis simply say what it means?

Pushing further down this line of reasoning, the moderate Christian's entire religion begins to unravel. When cornered, moderates will reluctantly concede that Adam and Eve, and the Garden of Eden, never existed. They prefer to hang their hats on the life and teachings of Jesus as recounted in the New Testament. How then does Jesus's genealogy (through his "adopted" father, Joseph) trace back to and terminate at Adam, as stated in Luke 3:23-38? What are we to make of the doctrine (subscribed to by most, but not all Christian denominations) that Jesus's sacrifice on the cross was an atonement for the "original sin" of Adam of Eve taking the forbidden fruit, a sin that all humanity inherits?

These examples are just a few of the many instances in which the moderate position ignores, downplays, or rationalizes away what the Bible actually says. As Sam Harris notes in An Atheist Manifesto, at least "fundamentalists tend to make a more principled use of their brains than 'moderates'", who are "apt to produce the most unctuous and stupefying nonsense imaginable". "Religious moderates", he writes in The End of Faith, "betray faith and reason equally".

Furthermore, in employing argumentum ad temperantiam, moderates tend also to commit the fallacy of false equivalence, wherein atheists are viewed as mirror images of fundamentalists. Since fundamentalists tend to be dogmatic, intolerant, and closed-minded, those traits are projected onto atheists. This is where the meaningless term "atheist fundamentalism" comes from2. Thus Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are viewed as no more reasonable then Jerry Fallwell or Pat Robertson, just the opposite side of the same coin. This is how moderates give themselves license to dismiss atheists' arguments without meeting the burden of carefully and rigorously considering them.

As I discussed in An Honest Conversation, religious moderates are not harmless, as they shelter fundamentalists from the full force of a collision with reason, and unwittingly give rise to the very religious excesses they are likely to oppose. It is time to call moderation out for what it is: self-contradictory, incoherent nonsense.

1Francis Collins served as the American head of the Human Genome Project, and is a moderate evangelical Christian. He is also the author of The Language of God, in which he attempts to harmonize science and Christianity. I have not yet read the book, but I do recommend Sam Harris' review on TruthDig.

2Oxford theologian Alister McGrath used this phrase in the subtitle of his book The Dawkins Delusion, a response to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. I have not read McGrath's book, but I expect it to be underwhelming.

Samuel SkinnerGood post- the books don't confront it because it was a reaction to the "new" atheists books.However, I think the moderate arguement is "we aren't doing anything, (confrontation, rocking the boat) so we are better". It is like the moderates that Dr. King lambasted. When there are problems the proper solution is to face them, not to talk about how we should learn tolerance and not do anything.

I am a Christian (not sure if I'd take the label "moderate", but "liberal" or "progressive" might fit better), and I agree largely with what you're saying about the "moderate" position. I am happier saying that the Bible is simply wrong about stuff like that, and changing my view of the Bible, rather than handwaving and pretending it's all going to be ok. Where then is the boundary of Christian/not-Christian? I don't know. And maybe it doesn't matter.